Kevin Morby stays rustic on new album ‘This Is A Photograph’
Kevin Morby has released his new album, This Is A Photograph, as the perfect folk-infused springtime listen, and it seems as though it arrived just on time.
Inspired by an experience of holding a photograph of his father as a young man in his childhood home of Kansas City, the story of Morby working on the album gets started with a harrowing experience of seeing his father collapse and be rushed to the hospital. “In the photo he looks young and full of confidence, puffing his chest out at the camera as if he were looking for a fight,” explains Morby. “It was not lost on me that this was the same chest, just hours before, I had seen the ambulance put a stethoscope against as he lay on the kitchen floor of my sister’s house.”
Morby then got to work on his music, moving to Memphis to complete the project before recording the entire project at Sam Cohen’s upstate New York studio — and what we got out of it this experience was a bittersweet album that’s both upbeat and haunting in the same breath. Actually, I’d rather use the word “lingering” in place of “haunting” as there remains a looming optimism that skips across the surface of Morby’s words.
This Is A Photograph is to springtime what For Emma, Forever Ago is to winter, with its lyrical depth, its instrumental quality, its quirk, and its distinct homegrown quality. ‘A Coat of Butterflies’ serenades the listener as the campfire song that hums on at the end of the night with the glow of the embers. ‘Bittersweet, TN’ pours on the major key sweetness and simplicity, Cassandra Jenkins’ featured vocals layering on the strings section like a cherry on top. ‘Goodbye To Good Times’, meanwhile, is soft and forlorn, with an almost Lou Reed-like quality. It sounds like the image of looking into the rearview as you drive away from a beautiful summer evening with the windows down.
This is an album that encompasses many different waves. While I do think of this as the spring foil of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, there is also the contrast of the polished quality. Bon Iver’s effort was stripped down—a minimal early-career grassroots effort. This Is A Photograph shows us the flip side, complete with strings, banjo, organ, and saxophone.
The album is a lyrical marvel. ‘Stop Before I Cry’ offers up the line that has continued to ring in my head since my first listen: “I want to go out dancing as soon as the world returns,” Morby sings. It’s simple, but there’s something unerringly chilling about it, especially when we consider the writing process of the record spanning through 2020. The entire album is filled with whispers and shouts like this one, and I imagine the individual lyrics that stick will vary from person to person. It’s just one of those albums.
With its excellence comes a handful of tedious moments here and there—the few-second interludes of ‘Intro’ and ‘Forever Inside A Picture’ seem like they could do more for the album if there was more of a commitment to them, or if they were done away with altogether. But this isn’t new by any means.
Really, I find that this album seems to have accomplished exactly what it set out to do: to keep Kevin Morby’s rustic charm, delivered with raw emotion that his followers have grown to rely on. It’s an album through which you can see the beauty of the world.
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